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DISCONNECTED NOTIONS
95 to stealing. Probably the error is due to hasty diction or copying.
As already stated, these differences do not mean any real splits. They merely mark the limits of the latitude allowed on the path of Renunciation to the aspiring soul. The things to be given up are the same ; at best only the order of their giving up varies. Finally, in the seventh pratima all the deviating lines become merged in one path, which is common for all thereafter.
DISCONNECTED NOTIONS. ABOUT a hundred years ago there lived in Germany a thinker
named Arthur Schopenhauer. He wrote essays, and also a big book called "Die Welt als Wille und " Vorstellung" which has been translated into English as The World as Will and Idea, London, 1886, in three volumes. Although there is in his writings a great deal which differs from the Jain doctrines, it seems to me that in the main he expresses at least one aspect of them, namely, that this world (the sansara) is full of misery and the best thing to do is to get out of it.
Referring to the same author but dealing with another subject, we find on page 432 of the third volume in the chapter headed “On the Doctrine of The Denial of the Will to Live," "the following statement: Theism, calculated with reference to "the capacity of the multitude, places the source of existence "without us, as an object. All mysticism, and so also Sufism, "according to the various degrees of its initiation, draws it “gradually back within us, as the subject, and the adept recog"nises at last with wonder and delight that he is it himself. “This procedure............we final............expressed by Meister “Eckhard.........in the form of a precept for the ascetic, that he “seek God not outside himself."
This confirms the idea that people make themselves what they are ; that their maker is not outside themselves. We make ourselves what we are by doing what we do, students by studying, liars by lying, teachers by teaching. Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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